The Not-Quite States of America

by Doug Mack

  She expected the USA of movies—tall buildings, bustling cities—and arrived disappointed; Saipan was less developed than Jiangsu. The factory was also a letdown—no, more than that, a nightmare. It was called Mirage. There were eight other women in the room, with no air-conditioning, beds consisting of bamboo mats laid on wooden frames, and the occasional rat scampering by her head.

  “In China it’s hard, but not hard like Saipan,” Chun told me.

  Her first job was sewing hems on blouses, with a quota of one thousand every day and “cruel” monitors who would shake down workers for bribes of as much as $500. Accidents were common; scammers were rampant, like one who took $3,000 from Chun with the false promise of getting her a green card; debt bondage—workers having their wages garnished for recruitment fees, plane tickets, room and board—was a fact of life. CNMI work permits were contingent on a contract with a specific employer. To quit was to jeopardize your immigration status. To file a complaint with local labor officials, as Chun found out the hard way, was to navigate an unsympathetic bureaucracy that typically sided with the employers. To go home, for many workers, was to face loan sharks who had fronted the placement fee, and disappointed family.

  All of this had been even worse before a 1998 congressional report by California Democrat George Miller. In addition to the garment factories, Miller found Indians who worked in stores and “were not allowed out of sight of their employer,” and Chinese men lured with false promises of construction jobs; one politely asked Miller, “Could you help us arrange to sell one of our kidneys so we could have enough money to return home?”

  Chun was paid minimum wage, $3.05 an hour. After taxes and deductions for room and board, she earned about $412 per month, after working sixty to seventy-hour workweeks.

  This is where things get complicated. To me, those hours are exploitative, the pay criminally low. This was a key point of the news coverage about Saipan’s garment industry in the late 1990s—20/20 came here, the New York Times, Time, Ms., the Associated Press. But to Chun, it was very good money. This was why she was here: to earn more than she could in China. Here, unlike there, overtime meant time-and-a-half pay, and she wanted as much of it as possible. The mantra was, Work and save, work and save.

  Part of me cheered, Such stoic self-sacrifice! Eyes on the prize!

  But mostly I felt slow-burn outrage. What we had here was not just strivers hoping to improve their lot but rampant exploitation of that desire—abuse of strivers’ bodies and dreams by the people who controlled their destiny. Based on all the other accounts I heard and read—the most thorough is John Bowe’s 2007 book Nobodies—Chun’s experiences were typical. And as Bowe writes, “the fact that workers wanted more hours needed further parsing: if they were paid a higher wage, they could work forty hours a week and still have a decent life.”

  Chun sat perfectly upright as she spoke, clutching her designer leather handbag. There was an unmistakable weariness to her voice as she talked about the six factories in which she’d worked. A pair of joggers cruised by, not even noticing us.

  It wasn’t all bad, she said. She enjoyed the warm weather and the exotic flowers; also, “I like the freedom.”

  The latent patriot in me perked up. Like, freedom of expression? Political freedom?

  No. “In China, you have family, you have to call, you have to buy food every day, you have to take care of them. Here, I don’t have to, right?”

  I tried to formulate a question that circled back to the American Dream and whether she thought she’d found it. It was, admittedly, abstract and probing. By this time, Chun had started to warm up, but now I’d taken us right back to awkwardness. She looked at Walt.

  “Here’s what I think is important,” he said. “When she came, it wasn’t, ‘Go to America and succeed and become wealthy.’ It was specifically to work at a garment factory, specifically to make x dollars an hour, for a specific period of time”—a contract was typically three years—“and then go home.”

  After Miller’s report and further congressional study, the CNMI garment industry was officially an embarrassment to the United States. In 2000, the U.S. Senate unanimously voted to extend the federal minimum wage to the CNMI. But when the bill moved over to the House of Representatives, Speaker of the House DeLay blocked it from reaching a vote. DeLay had been to Saipan a couple of times, at the invitation of lobbyist Jack Abramoff, whom the CNMI government paid more than $7 million. DeLay played two rounds at Lao Lao Bay and called Saipan “a perfect petri dish of capitalism.” If you’re looking for insular communities with rampant cronyism and a stubborn resistance to change, you’ll find a prime example in Washington, D.C.

  The CNMI’s minimum wage didn’t budge from $3.05 until 2007, when Congress—in its power as ultimate ruler of the territory—moved it to $3.55, with a mandate that it increase every year until it reaches parity with the federal minimum wage, which is all well and good except that the timetable has been pushed back multiple times. And after the 2005 elimination of the worldwide General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), “Made in USA” no longer had the same tariff-avoiding economic advantage. Factories on Saipan started to shut in 2000, anticipating the end of GATT, and the last closed in 2009. Simultaneously, the commonwealth’s tourism industry had been hit hard by the reeling Japanese economy, starting in the late 1990s, leading to the empty hotels, the abandoned Fiesta. It was a one-two punch of an economic hit. The last population figures, from 2013, show 53,855 people living in the CNMI, though it’s well known that there are many more—perhaps tens of thousands more—uncounted immigrants.

  Federal officials took over CNMI immigration in 2007, but they made things even more complicated. Chun had a contract worker visa, which the government was, as we spoke, planning to phase out. Anyone who had arrived using the contract worker visa could stay, but if they ever left for any reason they’d have to reapply for a new, more restrictive visa, shelling out $300 or more just for the opportunity.

  “So people are trapped here,” Walt said. “They can’t visit their family in the Philippines or China because they don’t have enough money to fly and to apply to come back.”

  At this particular moment, in Washington, D.C., there was a debate about granting amnesty to undocumented immigrants, especially those from Mexico, Central America, and South America. Lost in that discussion, Walt pointed out, were the immigrants on Saipan, who’d come legally but were trapped in a limbo state, the laws under which they had emigrated soon to be changed. They seemed like good candidates for permanent-resident status—or even a clear path to citizenship—given their circumstances, but the precedent this would set for other immigrants, back in the states, made it a long shot in Congress. And locally, Walt added, “indigenous politicians here will rarely favor a move that favors a path to citizenship for the contract workers, and the reason for that is the fear of loss of control.” Add a critical mass of new citizens and you’ve got a bloc of people with newfound power and political voice—they might well come out of the shadows.

  Chun quit the garment industry for good in 2008. Now she works two jobs, at a nutritional supplement store and at the Fiesta Resort. About eleven and a half hours a day, six days a week, with shorter days on Fridays. The long hours are her own choice.

  “For me, I think I am happy,” she said.

  “Do you still want to go to America?” Walt asked, meaning the states.

  “Maybe. I just want to see,” Chun said. “But I heard it’s not all good.”

  THE TERRITORIES are a geopolitical personality test: Is the glass half full or half empty? Are they lands of opportunity or disappointment?

  When you compare them to other countries in their own regions and look purely at cold, hard figures, things appear pretty good: higher incomes, better infrastructure, longer life spans, higher literacy, better health outcomes. If you compare the territories to the states, by the same measurements, the outlook is much more bleak. Then again, if you’re measuring collective well-being
by considering what places have maintained longtime traditions and distinct cultural identities, well, the ones without American oversight appear to be in better shape. In American Samoa, the comparisons were always to (Western) Samoa; about half the people with whom I spoke were wistful about their independent neighbor’s “more intact” traditions—more fales, more ceremonies—while the other half boasted of the American territories’ better roads, cleaner water, and access to American brand-name goods.

  Do you accept the argument that everything is awesome in the territories for the simple fact that, regardless of whether the glass is half full or half empty, at least the tap water is potable?

  By the way, on Saipan, the tap water for most residents is not potable.

  On my way back to my hotel one night, I stopped by the I ♥ SAIPAN duty-free store. Out front, four young Chamorro men, shirtless and in red wrap skirts, danced for a gathered crowd in the glow of tiki torches. They slapped their chests and waved for the cameras. It felt like an elegy for a culture.

  For the longest time, Angelo said, retirement age in the CNMI was thirty-eight, because people would get a government job at eighteen, work for twenty years, get their pension, and that was it. (Which is to say that the territory is a cautionary tale of both laissez-faire capitalism and big, stagnant government bureaucracies.) Angelo was in his mid-thirties, “and I feel like I’m just starting to have an impact.” A few years earlier, he had been instrumental in advocating for the creation of the Marianas Trench Marine National Monument, which George W. Bush established in the final days of his presidency, protecting more than ninety-five thousand square miles of land and ocean.

  But Angelo still had big plans. In fact, he had to leave the island to take the next step in his career in marine conservation. Though some outsiders come to the territories to prove themselves, far more locals leave to do the same. The Saipan Blogger now lives in Washington, D.C., where he works for the Pew Charitable Trusts. I met him in person only after our paths happened to cross when I left the Northern Mariana Islands to check in on the rest of the former Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands and see how it measured up.

  WHILE THE CNMI became part of the United States, the other islands comprising the Trust Territory opted for independence, becoming the Federated States of Micronesia (or FSM), the Republic of Palau, and the Republic of the Marshall Islands. Each continues to have a strong relationship with their onetime overseer, having set up a Compact of Free Association with the USA. Technically speaking, their connection to the United States is as “freely associated states” and they’re insular areas, even though they’re not insular possessions. They’re sovereign nations with their own seats at the United Nations, where they are among the USA’s most reliable allies. But they’re also served by American domestic programs including the Federal Communications Commission, the Federal Emergency Management Administration, and the National Weather Service. They use the dollar and their residents serve in the American military, also at higher rates than any state. Their residents don’t need visas to visit or work in the United States.

  It was the Marshall Islands that most interested me. After an early morning flight to Guam, I boarded a United route known as the Island Hopper and bounced two thousand miles east by southeast before arriving in the nation’s capital, Majuro Atoll. It’s a curving ribbon in the ocean, twenty-six miles long and typically no more than a quarter mile in width; at the airport, the atoll has been bumped out to accommodate the width of the runway. Like the CNMI, the Marshalls were settled by outrigger-sailing ancient mariners—two of the most popular tourist souvenirs sold on Majuro are traditional stick charts, the stick-and-shell guides that navigators used to learn the locations of atolls and islands; and replicas of the famously speedy Marshallese outrigger sailboats. The islands were briefly claimed by Germany (in 1884), taken over by Japan after World War I, and invaded by the United States in 1944.¶ American GIs named the areas at either end of Majuro: Rita, after Rita Hayworth, lies to the east, in the densely developed area where most of the atoll’s twenty-seven thousand residents live, while Laura, after Lauren Bacall, is the pastoral western point.

  Today, Majuro is a developing-world small town of the twenty-first century, with a couple of big-box (well, like, medium-box) all-purpose stores called Payless, a concrete rectangle of a courthouse, a small but busy port. In downtown Majuro, such as it is, the buildings span practically edge to edge; parts of the atoll appear from the air to be a mass of pixels floating in the sea. Majuro didn’t make me perturbed in the way that Saipan did (though I suspect I would have found it more melancholy if I’d been coming from nearly anywhere else). There were no poker rooms; no sprawling, abandoned malls; no scantily clad women beckoning to me on street corners; no sense that the place had fallen on hard times, so much as a reality that the good times had never come at all.

  Near my hotel, a two-story turquoise building stood out. A large sign read BIKINI ATOLL TOWN HALL. Bikini and Majuro are more than five hundred miles apart, so this was like seeing Detroit City Hall in New York. It’s a result of the fact that the Marshall Islands were for decades the subjects of one of the most ambitious and deadly experiments in American history.

  In 1946, the American Navy forced residents of Bikini, Rongelap, Enewetak, and Wotho Atolls to evacuate their islands—their ancestral homelands—to make room for nuclear testing. It was, they said, “for the good of mankind and to end all wars.” This was a new generation of firepower: the March 1954 Bravo test, at Bikini, was fifteen megatons, a thousand times the explosive force of Little Boy. In all, there were sixty-seven detonations, and taken together, they were equal to “1.6 Hiroshima bombs being detonated every day” over the twelve years of testing, writes Marshall Islands Journal editor Giff Johnson in his insightful report Nuclear Past, Unclear Future.

  The fallout drifted far from the evacuated areas, and people on every atoll in the Marshall Islands were exposed to high doses of radiation, many suffering skin burns, vomiting, and diarrhea; their hair and fingernails fell out. The long-term effects were far worse: a 2004 study by the U.S. National Cancer Institute found that, all told, the testing would likely result in 532 cases of cancer among the Marshallese, to say nothing of the impact of having their communities uprooted. Even today, Bikinians are Cold War refugees, living on Majuro and Kili Atoll; the people of Rongelap also continue to live in exile.

  Just outside the Hotel Robert Reimers, where I was staying, was one of Majuro’s busiest spots, the Te-Eak Im We-Eak Snack Shack, where old men played checkers, using washers and bolts as pieces. Across the street was a U.S. post office storefront (Majuro’s zip code is 96960; postage rates are the same as in the states, but the physical stamps say “Marshall Islands”) and next door to this was a clinic where anyone can walk in and get free radiation testing. This was a provision of the Compact of Free Association that the Marshall Islands negotiated when it became independent in 1983. The U.S. agreed to pay a total of $270 million, spread out in annual payments from 1986 to 2001, as “the full settlement of all claims, past, present, and future” for the effects of the nuclear testing. Specific claims would be awarded by a Nuclear Claims Tribunal.

  One afternoon, I met a former chairman of the tribunal, an American named Jim Plasman, with khaki pants and a white mustache, in his office as he shuffled papers while the atoll’s power was out. “[People] would be awarded a set amount depending on the type of condition,” he said. “For instance, a benign thyroid nodule would be paid much less than lung cancer.” The awards ranged from $12,500 to $125,000, and added up quickly; before shutting down in 2001, the tribunal had awarded “over ninety million dollars for personal injuries and over two billion for damages to property.” But awarded doesn’t mean paid, and the USA hasn’t budged beyond its “full settlement” of $270 million, despite lawsuits and requests, including Plasman’s own testimony before Congress in 2007 that this amount was insufficient. No Marshallese received their full award. (In comparison, at the Nevad
a Test Site, where exposure was lower, paid compensation totaled around $1.2 billion.)

  “Legally, there’s probably no more obligation for the United States to do anything here,” a man named Jack Niedenthal told me. “But morally there’s still a huge deficit.” Bikini Jack, as he’s sometimes known, was an American who first came to the Marshall Islands with the Peace Corps in 1981. His scruffy goatee and tattooed knuckles belied his stature as the trust liaison for the people of Bikini Atoll. We met for lunch at the Hotel Robert Reimers’ restaurant, Tide Table, a generic-feeling room that seemed to be the crossroads of the island. Just sitting there, I met ambassadors and government officials and missionaries and NGO workers and plenty of locals, everyone at once cultivating the grandest of plans and hanging on for dear life, commiserating over Filipino beer, chicken teriyaki pizza, and sumo wrestling on the bar TV.

  “We’ve got about a forty percent unemployment rate, and people are working for two dollars an hour; that’s the minimum wage,” Jack said. Diabetes rates were among the highest in the world, but there was no dialysis on the island. Infrastructure was crumbling. The National Gym, opened in 1997, was now permanently closed due to termite damage and general neglect, although kids routinely broke the locks to go in and play basketball. At the national capitol, a twenty-one-year-old building with the glass curtain walls of a corporate headquarters, the offices of the president and the cabinet minister were uninhabitable due to structural damage; the root cause, according to recent report by a consultant from Honolulu, was a lack of “any apparent concern” on the part of the Marshallese government.

  As part of the Compact of Free Association, Marshall Islands citizens can travel and move freely to the United States, and, in search of better job prospects, many have done just that—about a third of the nation now lives in the USA (roughly 22,400 people, according to the 2010 Census, up from 6,700 ten years earlier). There’s a particularly large community in Springdale, Arkansas, working at the Tyson chicken plant. Notably, although other immigrants are eligible to receive Medicare and Social Security after five years in the United States, residents of the freely associated states are not—ever.